Читать книгу Last Ditch - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 8
ОглавлениеRicky heard a voice that might have been anybody’s but his saying:
‘Oh, hullo. Good evening. We meet again. Ha-ha.’
She looked at him with contempt. He said to Mr Jones:
‘We met at luncheon up at L’Esperance.’
‘Oh Christ!’ Mr Jones said in a tone of utter disgust. And to Miss Harkness, ‘What the hell were you doing up there?’
‘Nothing,’ she mumbled. ‘I came away.’
‘So I should bloody hope. Had they got some things of mine up there?’
‘Yes.’
He grunted and disappeared through a door at the far end of the room. Ricky attempted a conversation with Miss Harkness but got nowhere with it. She said something inaudible and retired upon a record-player where she made a choice and released a cacophony.
Mr Jones returned. He dropped on to a sort of divan bed covered with what looked like a horse-rug. He seemed to be inexplicably excited.
‘Take a chair,’ he yelled at Ricky.
Ricky took an armchair, misjudging the distance between his person and the seat, which, having lost its springs, thudded heavily on the floor. He landed in a ludicrous position, his knees level with his ears. Mr Jones and Miss Harkness burst into raucous laughter. Ricky painfully joined in – and they immediately stopped.
He stretched out his legs and began to look about him.
As far as he could make out in the restricted lighting provided by two naked and dirty bulbs, he was in the front of a dilapidated cottage whose rooms had been knocked together. The end where he found himself was occupied by a bench bearing a conglomeration of painter’s materials. Canvases were ranged along the walls including a work which seemed to have been inspired by Miss Harkness herself or at least by her breeches, which were represented with unexpected realism.
The rest of the room was occupied by the divan bed, chairs, a filthy sink, a colour television and a stereophonic record-player. A certain creeping smell as of defective drainage was overlaid by the familiar pungency of turpentine, oil and lead.
Ricky began to ask himself a series of unanswerable questions. Why had Miss Harkness decided against L’Esperance? Was Mr Jones the father of her child? How did Mr Jones contrive to support an existence combining extremes of squalor with colour television and a highly sophisticated record-player? How good or how bad was Mr Jones’s painting?
As if in answer to this last conundrum, Mr Jones got up and began to put a succession of canvases on the easel, presumably for Ricky to look at.
This was a familiar procedure for Ricky. For as long as he could remember, young painters fortified by an introduction or propelled by their own hardihood, would bring their works to his mother and prop them up for her astringent consideration. Ricky hoped he had learnt to look at pictures in the right way, but he had never learned to talk easily about them and in his experience the painters themselves, good or bad, were as a rule extremely inarticulate. Perhaps, in this respect, Mr Jones’s formidable silences were merely occupational characteristics.
But what would Troy, Ricky’s mother, have said about the paintings? Mr Jones had skipped through a tidy sequence of styles. As representation retired before abstraction and abstraction yielded to collage and collage to surrealism, Ricky fancied he could hear her crisp dismissal: ‘Not much cop, I’m afraid, poor chap.’
The exhibition and the pop music came to an end and Mr Jones’s high spirits seemed to die with them. In the deafening silence that followed Ricky felt he had to speak. He said: ‘Thank you very much for letting me see them.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ said Mr Jones, yawning hideously. ‘Obviously you haven’t understood what I’m doing.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Stuff it. You smoke?’
‘If you mean what I think you mean, no, I don’t.’
‘I didn’t mean anything.’
‘My mistake,’ Ricky said.
‘You ever take a trip?’
‘No,’
‘Bloody smug, aren’t we?’
‘Think so?’ Ricky said, and not without difficulty struggled to his feet. Miss Harkness was fully extended on the divan bed and was possibly asleep.
Mr Jones said: ‘I suppose you think you know what you like.’
‘Why not? Anyway, that’s a pretty crummy old crack, isn’t it?’
‘Do you ever look at anything that’s not in the pretty peep department?’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t know,’ Mr Jones said. ‘Such as Troy. Does the name Troy mean anything to you, by the way?’
‘Look,’ Ricky said, ‘it really is bad luck for you and I can’t answer without making it sound like a pay-off line. But, yes, the name Troy does mean quite a lot to me. She’s – I feel I ought to say “wait for it, wait for it” – she’s my mother.’
Mr Jones’s jaw dropped. This much could be distinguished by a change of direction in his beard. There were, too, involuntary movements of the legs and arms. He picked up a large tube of paint which he appeared to scrutinize closely. Presently he said in a voice which was pitched unnaturally high:
‘I couldn’t be expected to know that, could I?’
‘Indeed, you couldn’t.’
‘As a matter of fact, I’ve really gone through my Troy phase. You won’t agree, of course, but I’m afraid I feel she’s painted herself out.’
‘Are you?’
Mr Jones dropped the tube of paint on the floor.
Ricky picked it up.
‘Jerome et Cie,’ he said. ‘They’re a new firm, aren’t they? I think they sent my Mum some specimens to try. Do you get it direct from France?’
Jones took it from him.
‘I generally use acrylic,’ he said.
‘Well,’ Ricky said, ‘I think I’ll seek my virtuous couch. It was nice of you to ask me in.’
They faced each other as two divergent species in a menagerie might do.
‘Anyway,’ Ricky said, ‘we do both speak English, don’t we?’
‘You reckon?’ said Mr Jones. And after a further silence: ‘Oh Christ, forget the lot and have a beer.’
‘I’ll do that thing,’ said Ricky.
II
To say that after this exchange all went swimmingly at Mr Jones’s pad would not be an accurate account of that evening’s strange entertainment but at least the tone became less acrimonious. Indeed, Mr Jones developed high spirits of a sort and instructed Ricky to call him Syd. He was devoured by curiosity about Ricky’s mother, her approach to her work and – this was a tricky one – whether she took pupils. Ricky found this behavioural change both touching and painful.
Miss Harkness took no part in the conversation but moodily produced bottled beer of which she consumed rather a lot. It emerged that the horse Ricky had shrunk from in the dark was her mount. So, he supposed, she would not spend the night at Syd’s pad, but would ride, darkling, to the stables or – was it possible? – all the way to L’Esperance and the protection, scarcely, it seemed, called for, of the Pharamonds.
By midnight Ricky knew that Syd was a New Zealander by birth, which accounted for certain habits of speech. He had left his native soil at the age of seventeen and had lived in his pad for a year. He did some sort of casual labour at Leathers, the family riding-stables to which Miss Harkness was attached but from which she seemed to have been evicted.
‘He mucks out,’ said Miss Harkness in a solitary burst of conversation and, for no reason that Ricky could divine, gave a hoarse laugh.
It transpired that Syd occasionally visited St Pierre-des-Roches, the nearest port on the Normandy coast to which there was a weekly ferry service.
At a quarter to one Ricky left the pad, took six paces into the night and fell flat on his face in the mud. He could hear Miss Harkness’s horse giving signs of equine consternation.
The village was fast asleep under a starry sky, the sound of the night tide rose and fell uninterrupted by Ricky’s rubber-shod steps on the cobbled front. Somewhere out on the harbour a solitary light bobbed, and he wondered if Mr Ferrant was engaged in his hobby of night fishing. He paused to watch it and realized that it was nearer inshore than he had imagined and coming closer. He could hear the rhythmic dip of oars.
There was an old bench facing the front. Ricky thought he would wait there and join Mr Ferrant, if indeed it was he, when he landed.
The light vanished round the far side of the jetty. Ricky heard the gentle thump of the boat against a pier followed by irregular sounds of oars being stowed and objects shifted. A man with a lantern rose into view and made fast the mooring lines. He carried a pack on his back and began to walk down the jetty. He was too far away to be identified.
Ricky was about to get up and go to meet him when, as if by some illusionist’s trick, there was suddenly a second figure beside the first. Ricky remained where he was, in shadow.
The man with the lantern raised it to the level of his face, and Ricky saw that he was indeed Ferrant, caught in a Rembrandt-like golden effulgence. Ricky kept very still, feeling that to approach them would be an intrusion. They came towards him. Ferrant said something indistinguishable and the other replied in a voice that was not that of the locals: ‘OK, but watch it. Good night.’ They separated. The newcomer walked rapidly away towards the turning that led up to the main road and Ferrant crossed the street to his own house.
Ricky ran lightly and soundlessly after him. He was fitting his key in the lock and had his back turned.
‘Good morning, Mr Ferrant,’ Ricky said.
He spun round with an oath.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ricky stammered, himself jolted by this violent reaction. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
Ferrant said something in French, Ricky thought, and laughed, a little breathlessly.
‘Have you been making a night of it, then?’ he said, ‘Not much chance of that in the Cove.’
‘I’ve been up at Syd Jones’s.’
‘Have you now,’ said Ferrant. ‘Fancy that.’ He pushed the door open and stood back for Ricky to enter.
‘Good night then, Mr Alleyn,’ said Ferrant.
As Ricky entered he heard in the distance the sound of a car starting. It seemed to climb the steep lane out of Deep Cove, and at that moment he realized that the second man on the wharf had been Louis Pharamond.
The house was in darkness. Ricky crept upstairs making very little noise. Just before he shut his bedroom door he heard another door close quite near at hand.
For a time he lay awake listening to the sound of the tide and thinking what a long time it seemed since he arrived in Deep Cove. He drifted into a doze, and found the scarcely-formed persons of the book he hoped to write, taking upon themselves characteristics of the Pharamonds, of Sydney Jones, of Miss Harkness and the Ferrants, so that he scarcely knew which was which.
The next morning was cold and brilliant with a March wind blowing through a clear sky. Mrs Ferrant gave Ricky a grey mullet for his breakfast, the reward, it emerged, of her husband’s night excursion.
By ten o’clock he had settled down to a determined attack on his work.
He wrote in longhand, word after painful word. He wondered why on earth he couldn’t set about this job with something resembling a design. Once or twice he thought possibilities – the ghosts of promise – began to show themselves. There was one character, a woman, who had stepped forward and presented herself to be written about. An appreciable time went by before he realized he was dealing with Julia Pharamond.
It came as quite a surprise to find that he had been writing for two hours. He eased his fingers and filled his pipe. I’m feeling better, he thought.
Something spattered against the window-pane. He looked out and down, and there, with his face turned up, was Jasper Pharamond.
‘Good morning to you,’ Jasper called in his alto voice, ‘are you incommunicado? Is this a liberty?’
‘Of course not. Come up.’
‘Only for a moment.’
He heard Mrs Ferrant go down the passage, the door open and Jasper’s voice on the stairs: ‘It’s all right, thank you, Marie. I’ll find my way.’
Ricky went out to the landing and watched Jasper come upstairs. He pretended to make heavy weather of the ascent, rocking his shoulders from side to side and thumping his feet.
‘Really!’ he panted when he arrived. ‘This is the authentic setting. Attic stairs and the author embattled at the top. You must be sure to eat enough. May I come in?’
He came in, sat on Ricky’s bed with a pleasant air of familiarity, and waved his hand at the table and papers. ‘The signs are propitious,’ he said.
‘The place is propitious,’ Ricky said warmly. ‘And I’m very much obliged to you for finding it. Did you go tramping about the village and climbing interminable stairs?’
‘No, no. Julia plumped for Marie Ferrant.’
‘You knew her already?’
‘She was in service up at L’Esperance before she married. We’re old friends,’ said Jasper lightly.
Ricky thought that might explain Mrs Ferrant’s curiosity.
‘I’ve come with an invitation,’ Jasper said. ‘It’s just that we thought we’d go over to Montjoy to dine and trip a measure on Saturday and we wondered if it would amuse you to come.’
Ricky said: ‘I ought to say no, but I won’t. I’d love to.’
‘We must find somebody nice for you.’
‘It won’t by any chance be Miss Harkness?’
‘My dear!’ exclaimed Jasper excitedly. ‘Apropos the Harkness! Great drama! Well, great drama in a negative sense. She’s gone!’
‘When?’
‘Last night. Before dinner. She prowled down the drive, disappeared and never came back. Bruno wonders if she jumped over the cliff – too awful to contemplate.’
‘You may set your minds at rest,’ said Ricky. ‘She didn’t do that.’ And he told Jasper all about his evening with Syd Jones and Miss Harkness.
‘Well!’ said Jasper. ‘There you are. What a very farouche sort of girl. No doubt the painter is the partner of her shame and the father of her unborn babe. What’s he like? His work, for instance?’
‘You ought to be the best judge of that. You’ve got some of it pinned on your drawing-room walls.’
‘I might have known it!’ Jasper cried dramatically. ‘Another of Julia’s finds! She bought them in the street in Montjoy on Market Day. I can’t wait to tell her,’ Jasper said, rising energetically. ‘What fun! No. We must both tell her.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Down below, in the car. Come and see her, do.’
Ricky couldn’t resist the thought of Julia so near at hand. He followed Jasper down the stairs, his heart thumping as violently as if he had run up them.
It was a dashing sports car and Julia looked dashing and expensive to match it. She was in the driver’s seat, her gloved hands drooping on the wheel with their gauntlets turned back so that her wrists shone delicately. Jasper at once began to tell about Miss Harkness, inviting Ricky to join in. Ricky thought how brilliantly she seemed to listen and how this air of being tuned-in invested all the Pharamonds. He wondered if they lost interest as suddenly as they acquired it.
When he had answered her questions she said briskly: ‘A case, no doubt, of like calling to like. Both of them naturally speechless. No doubt she’s gone into residence at the pad.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Ricky said. ‘Her horse was there, don’t forget. It seemed to be floundering about in the dark.’
Jasper said, ‘She would hardly leave it like that all night. Perhaps it was only a social call after all.’
‘How very odd,’ Julia said, ‘to think of Miss Harkness in the small hours of the morning, riding through the Cove. I wonder she didn’t wake you up.’
‘She may not have passed by my window.’
‘Well,’ Julia said, ‘I’m beginning all of a sudden to weary of Miss Harkness. It was very boring of her to be so rude, walking out on us like that.’
‘It’d have been a sight more boring if she’d stayed, however,’ Jasper pointed out.
There was a clatter of shoes on the cobblestones and the Ferrant son, Louis, came running by on his way home from school. He slowed up when he saw the car and dragged his feet, staring at it and walking backwards.
‘Hullo, young Louis,’ Ricky said.
He didn’t answer. His sloe eyes looked out of a pale face under a dark thatch of hair. He backed slowly away, turned and suddenly ran off down the street.
‘That’s Master Ferrant, that was,’ said Ricky.
Neither of the Pharamonds seemed to have heard him. For a second or two they looked after the little boy and then Jasper said lightly: ‘Dear me! It seems only the other day that his Mum was a bouncing tweeny or parlourmaid, or whatever it was she bounced at.’
‘Before my time,’ said Julia. ‘She’s a marvellous laundress and still operates for us. Darling, we’re keeping Ricky out here. Who can tell what golden phrase we may have aborted. Super that you can come on Saturday, Ricky.’
‘Pick you up at eightish,’ cried Jasper, bustling into the car. They were off, and Ricky went back to his room.
But not, at first, to work. He seemed to have taken the Pharamonds upstairs, and with them little Louis Ferrant, so that the room was quite crowded with white faces, black hair and brilliant pitch-ball eyes.
III
Montjoy might have been on another island from the Cove and in a different sea. Once a predominantly French fishing village, it was now a fashionable place with marinas, a yacht club, surfing, striped umbrellas and, above all, the celebrated Hotel Montjoy itself with its Stardust Ballroom, whose plateglass dome and multiple windows could be seen, airily glowing, from far out to sea. Here, one dined and danced expensively to a famous band, and here, on Saturday night at a window-table sat the Pharamonds, Ricky and a girl called Susie de Waite.
They ate lobster salad and drank champagne. Ricky talked to and danced with Susie de Waite as was expected of him and tried not to look too long and too often at Julia Pharamond.
Julia was in great form, every now and then letting off the spluttering firework of her laughter. He had noticed at luncheon that she had uninhibited table-manners and ate very quickly. Occasionally she sucked her fingers. Once when he had watched her doing this he found Jasper looking at him with amusement.
‘Julia’s eating habits,’ he remarked, ‘are those of a partially-trained marmoset.’
‘Darling,’ said Julia, waggling the sucked fingers at him, ‘I love you better than life itself.’
‘If only,’ Ricky thought, ‘she would look at me like that’ – and immediately she did, causing his unsophisticated heart to bang at his ribs and the blood mount to the roots of his hair.
Ricky considered himself pretty well adjusted to the contemporary scene. But, he thought, every adventure that he had experienced so far had been like a bit of fill-in dialogue leading to the entry of the star. And here, beyond all question, she was.
She waltzed now with her cousin Louis. He was an accomplished dancer and Julia followed him effortlessly. They didn’t talk to each other, Ricky noticed. They just floated together – beautifully.
Ricky decided that he didn’t perhaps quite like Louis pharamond. He was too smooth. And anyway, what had he been up to in the Cove at one o’clock in the morning?
The lights were dimmed to a black-out. From somewhere in the dome, balloons, treated to respond to ultraviolet ray, were released in hundreds and jostled uncannily together, filling the ballroom with luminous bubbles. The band reduced itself to the whispering shish-shish of waves on the beach below. The dancers, scarcely moving, resembled those shadows that seem to bob and pulse behind the screen of an inactive television set.
‘May we?’ Ricky asked Susie de Waite.
He had once heard his mother say that a great deal of his father’s success as an investigating officer stemmed from his gift for getting people to talk about themselves. ‘It’s surprising,’ she had said, ‘how few of them can resist him.’
‘Did you?’ her son asked.
‘Yes,’ Troy said, and after a pause, ‘but not for long.’
So Ricky asked Susie de Waite about herself and it was indeed surprising how readily she responded. It was also surprising how unstimulating he found her self-revelations.
And then, abruptly, the evening was set on fire. They came alongside Julia and Louis and Julia called to Ricky.
‘Ricky, if you don’t dance with me again at once I shall take umbrage.’ And then to Louis. ‘Goodbye, darling. I’m off.’
And she was in Ricky’s arms. The stars in the sky had come reeling down into the ballroom and the sea had got into his eardrums and bliss had taken up its abode in him for the duration of a waltz.
They left at two o’clock in the large car that belonged, it seemed, to the Louis Pharamonds. Louis drove with Susie de Waite next to him and Bruno on her far side. Ricky found himself at the back between Julia and Carlotta, and Jasper was on the tip-up seat facing them.
When they were clear of Montjoy on the straight road to the Cove, Louis asked Susie if she’d like to steer, and on her rapturously accepting, put his arm round her. She took the wheel.
‘Is this all right?’ Carlotta asked at large. ‘Is she safe?’
‘It’s fantastic,’ gabbled Susie. ‘Safe as houses. Promise! Ow! Sorry!
She really is rather an ass of a girl, Ricky thought.
Julia picked up Ricky’s hand and then Carlotta’s. ‘Was it a pleasant party?’ she asked, gently tapping their knuckles together. ‘Have you liked it?’
Ricky said he’d adored it. Julia’s hand was still in his. He wondered whether it would be all right to kiss it under, as it were, her husband’s nose, but felt he lacked the style. She gave his hand a little squeeze, dropped it, leant forward and kissed her husband.
‘Sweetie,’ Julia cried extravagantly, ‘you are such heaven! Do look, Ricky, that’s Leathers up there where Miss Harkness does her stuff. We really must all go riding with her before it’s too late.’
‘What do you mean,’ her husband asked, ‘by your “too late”?’
‘Too late for Miss Harkness, of course. Unless, of course, she does it on purpose, but that would be very silly of her. Too silly for words,’ said Julia severely.
Susie de Waite let out a scream that modulated into a giggle. The car shot across the road and back again.
Carlotta said sharply: ‘Louis, do keep your techniques for another setting.’
Louis gave what Ricky thought of as a bedroom laugh, cuddled Susie up and closed his hand over hers on the wheel.
‘Behave,’ he said. ‘Bad girl.’
They arrived at the lane that descended precipitously into the Cove. Louis took charge, drove pretty rapidly down it and pulled up in front of the Ferrant cottage.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Abode of the dark yet passing-fair Marie. Is she still dark and passing-fair, by the way?’
Nobody answered.
Louis said very loudly: ‘Any progeny? Oh, but of course. I forgot.’
‘Shut up,’ Jasper said, in a tone of voice that Ricky hadn’t heard from him before.
He and Julia and Carlotta together said good night to Ricky, who by this time was outside the car. He shut the door as quietly as he could and stood back. Louis reversed noisily and much too fast. He called out something that sounded like: ‘Give her my love.’ The car shot away in low gear and roared up the lane.
Upstairs on the dark landing Ricky could hear Ferrant snoring prodigiously and pictured him with his red hair and high colour and his mouth wide open. Evidently he had not gone fishing that night.
IV
In her studio in Chelsea, Troy shoved her son’s letter into the pocket of her painting smock and said:
‘He’s fallen for Julia Pharamond.’
‘Has he, now?’ said Alleyn. ‘Does he announce it in so many words?’
‘No, but he manages to drag her into every other sentence of his letter. Take a look.’
Alleyn read his son’s letter with a lifted eyebrow. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said presently.
‘Oh well,’ Troy muttered. ‘It’ll be one girl and then another, I suppose, and then, with any luck, just one and that a nice one. In the meantime, she’s very attractive. Isn’t she?’
‘A change from dirty feet, jeans, and beads in the soup, at least.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Troy.
‘He may tire of her heavenly inconsequence.’
‘You think so?’
‘Well, I would. They seem to be taking quite a lot of trouble over him. Kind of them.’
‘He’s a jolly nice young man,’ Troy said firmly.
Alleyn chuckled and read on in silence.
‘Why,’ Troy asked presently, ‘do you suppose they live on that island?’
‘Dodging taxation. They’re clearly a very clannish lot. The other two are there.’
‘The cousins that came on board at Acapulco?’
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘It was a sort of enclave of cousins.’
‘The Louis’s seem to live with the Jaspers, don’t they?’
‘Looks like it.’ Alleyn turned a page of the letter. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘besotted or not, he seems to be writing quite steadily.’
‘I wonder if his stuff’s any good, Rory? Do you wonder?’
‘Of course I do,’ he said, and went to her.
‘It can be tough going, though, can’t it?’
‘Didn’t you swan through a similar stage?’
‘Now I come to think of it,’ Troy said, squeezing a dollop of flake white on her palette, ‘I did. I wouldn’t tell my parents anything about my young men and I wouldn’t show them anything I painted. I can’t imagine why.’
‘You gave me the full treatment when I first saw you, didn’t you? About your painting?’
‘Did I? No, I didn’t. Shut up,’ said Troy, laughing. She began to paint.
‘That’s the new brand of colour, isn’t it? Jerome et Cie?’ said Alleyn, and picked up a tube.
‘They sent it for free. Hoping I’d talk about it, I suppose. The white and the earth colours are all right but the primaries aren’t too hot. Rather odd, isn’t it, that Rick should mention them?’
‘Rick? Where?’
‘You haven’t got to the bit about his new painting chum and the pregnant equestrienne.’
‘For the love of Mike!’ Alleyn grunted and read on. ‘I must say,’ he said, when he’d finished, ‘he can write, you know, darling. He can indeed.’
Troy put down her palette, flung her arm round him and pushed her head into his shoulder. ‘He’ll do us nicely,’ she said, ‘won’t he? But it was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it? About Jerome et Cie and their paint?’
‘In a way,’ said Alleyn, ‘I suppose it was.’
V
On the morning after the party, Ricky apologized to Mrs Ferrant for the noisy return in the small hours, and although Mr Ferrant’s snores were loud in his memory, said he was afraid he had been disturbed.
‘It’d take more than that to rouse him,’ she said. She never referred to her husband by name. ‘I heard you. Not you but him. Pharamond. The older one.’
She gave Ricky a sideways look that he couldn’t fathom. Derisive? Defiant? Sly? Whatever lay behind her manner, it was certainly not that of an ex-domestic cook, however emancipated. She left him with the feeling that the corner of a curtain had been lifted and dropped before he could see what lay beyond it.
During the week he saw nothing of the Pharamonds except in one rather curious incident on the Thursday evening. Feeling the need of a change of scene, he had wheeled his bicycle up the steep lane, pedalled along the road to Montjoy and at a point not far from L’Esperance had left his machine by the wayside and walked towards the cliff-edge.
The evening was brilliant and the Channel, for once, blue with patches of bedazzlement. He sat down with his back to a warm rock at a place where the cliff opened into a ravine through which a rough path led between clumps of wild broom, down to the sea. The air was heady and a salt breeze felt for his lips. A lark sang and Ricky would have liked a girl – any girl – to come up through the broom from the sea with a reckless face and the sun in her eyes.
Instead, Louis Pharamond came up the path. He was below Ricky, who looked at the top of his head. He leant forward, climbing, swinging his arms, his chin down.
Ricky didn’t want to encounter Louis. He shuffled quickly round the rock and lay on his face. He heard Louis pass by on the other side. Ricky waited until the footsteps died away, wondering at his own behaviour.
He was about to get up when he heard a displaced stone roll down the path. The crown of a head and the top of a pair of shoulders appeared below him. Grossly foreshortened though they were, there was no mistaking who they belonged to. Ricky sank down behind his rock and let Miss Harkness, in her turn, pass him by.
He rode back to the cottage.
He was gradually becoming persona grata at the pub. He was given a ‘good evening’ when he came in and warmed up to when, his work having prospered that day, he celebrated by standing drinks all round. Bill Prentice, the fish-truck driver, offered to give him a lift into Montjoy if ever he fancied it. They settled for the coming morning. It was then that Miss Harkness came into the bar alone.
Her entrance was followed by a shuffling of feet and by the exchange of furtive smiles. She ordered a glass of port. Ferrant, leaning back against the bar in his favourite pose, looked her over. He said something that Ricky couldn’t hear and raised a guffaw. She smiled slightly. Ricky realized that with her entrance the atmosphere in the Cod-and-Bottle had become that of the stud. And that not a man there was unaware of it. So this, he thought, is what Miss Harkness is about.
The next morning, very early, Ricky tied his bicycle to the roof of the fish-truck and himself climbed into the front seat.
He was taken aback to find that Syd Jones was to be a fellow-passenger. Here he came, hunched up in a dismal mackintosh, with his paintbox slung over his shoulder, a plastic carrier-bag and a large and superior suitcase which seemed to be unconscionably heavy.
‘Hullo,’ Ricky said. ‘Are you moving into the Hotel Montjoy, with your grand suitcase?’
‘Why the hell would I do that?’
‘All right, all right, let it pass. Sorry.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t fall about at upper-middle-class humour.’
‘My mistake,’ said Ricky. ‘I do better in the evenings.’
‘I haven’t noticed it.’
‘You may be right. Here comes Bill. Where are you going to put your case? On the roof with my upper-middle-class bike?’
‘In front. Shift your feet. Watch it.’
He heaved the case up, obviously with an effort, pushed it along the floor under Ricky’s legs and climbed up. Bill Prentice, redolent of fish, mounted the driver’s seat, Syd nursed his paintbox and Ricky was crammed in between them.
It was a sparkling morning. The truck rattled up the steep lane, they came out into sunshine at the top and banged along the main road to Montjoy. Ricky was in good spirits.
They passed the entry into Leathers with its signboard: ‘Riding Stables. Hacks and Ponies for hire. Qualified Instructors.’ He wondered if Miss Harkness was up and about. He shouted above the engine to Syd: ‘You don’t go there every day, do you?’
‘Definitely bloody not,’ Syd shouted back. It was the first time Ricky had heard him raise his voice.
The road made a blind turn round a dense copse. Bill took it on the wrong side at forty miles an hour.
The windscreen was filled with Miss Harkness on a plunging bay horse, all teeth and eyes and flying hooves. An underbelly and straining girth reared into sight. The brakes shrieked, the truck skidded, the world turned sideways, and the passenger’s door flew open. Syd Jones, his paintbox and his suitcase shot out. The van rocked and sickeningly righted itself on the verge in a cloud of dust. The horse could be seen struggling on the ground and its rider on her feet with the reins still in her hands. The engine had stopped and the air was shattered by imprecations – a three-part disharmony from Bill, Syd and, predominantly, Miss Harkness.
Bill turned off the ignition, dragged his hand-brake on, got out and approached Miss Harkness, who told him with oaths to keep off. Without a pause in her stream of abuse she encouraged her mount to clamber to its feet, checked its impulse to bolt and began gently to examine it; her great horny hand passed with infinite delicacy down its trembling legs and heaving barrel. It was, Ricky saw, a wall-eyed horse.
‘Keep the hell out of it,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll hear about this.’
She led the horse along the far side of the road and past the truck. It snorted and plunged but she calmed it. When they had gone some distance, she mounted. The sound of its hooves, walking, diminished. Bill began to swear again.
Ricky slid out of the truck on the passenger’s side. The paintbox had burst open and its contents were scattered about the grass. The catches on the suitcase had been sprung and the lid had flown back. Ricky saw that it was full of unopened cartons of Jerome et Cie’s paints. Syd Jones squatted on the verge, collecting tubes and fitting them back into their compartments.
Ricky stooped to help him.
‘Cut that out!’ he snarled.
‘Very well, you dear little man,’ Ricky said, with a strong inclination to throw one at his head. He took a step backwards, felt something give under his heel and looked down. He had trodden on a large tube of vermilion and burst the end open. Paint had spurted over his shoe.
‘Oh damn, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m most awfully sorry.’
He reached for the depleted tube. It was snatched from under his hand. Syd, on his knees, the tube in his grasp and his fingers reddened, mouthed at him. What he said was short and unprintable.
‘Look,’ Ricky said. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the paint and if you feel like a fight you’ve only to say so and we’ll shape up and make fools of ourselves here and now. How about it?’
Syd was crouched over his task. He mumbled something that might have been ‘Forget it.’ Ricky, feeling silly, walked round to the other side of the truck. It was being inspected by Bill Prentice with much the same intensity as Miss Harkness had displayed when she examined her horse. The smell of petrol now mingled with the smell of fish.
‘She’s OK,’ Bill said at last and climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘Silly bitch,’ he added, referring to Miss Harkness, and started up the engine.
Syd loomed up on the far side with his suitcase, round which he had buckled his belt. His jeans drooped from his hip-bones as if from a coat-hanger.
‘Hang on a sec,’ Bill shouted.
He engaged his gear and the truck lurched back on the road. Syd waited. Ricky walked round to the passenger’s side. To his astonishment, Syd observed on what sounded like a placatory note: ‘Bike’s OK, then?’
They climbed on board and the journey continued. Bill’s strictures upon Miss Harkness were severe and modified only, Ricky felt, out of consideration for Syd’s supposed feelings. The burden of his plaint was that horse-traffic should be forbidden on the roads.
‘What was she on about?’ he complained. ‘The horse was OK.’
‘It was Mungo,’ Syd offered. ‘She’s crazy about it. Savage brute of a thing.’
‘That so?’
‘Bit me. Kicked the old man. He wants to have it destroyed.’
‘Is it all right with her?’ asked Ricky.
‘So she reckons. It’s an outlaw with everyone else.’
They arrived at the only petrol station between the Cove and Montjoy. Bill pulled into it for fuel and oil and held the attendant rapt with an exhaustive coverage of the incident.
Syd complained in his dull voice: ‘I’ve got a bloody boat to catch, haven’t I?’
Ricky, who was determined not to make advances, looked at his watch and said that there was time in hand.
After an uncomfortable silence Syd said, ‘I’m funny about my painting gear. You know? I can’t do with anyone else handling it. You know? If anyone else scrounges my paint, you know, borrows some, I can’t use that tube again. It’s kind of contaminated. Get what I mean?’
Ricky thought that what he seemed to mean was a load of highfalutin’ balls, but he gave a tolerant grunt and after a moment or two Syd began to talk. Ricky could only suppose that he was trying to make amends. His discourse was obscure but it transpired that he had been given some kind of agency by Jerome et Cie. He was to leave free samples of their paints at certain shops and with a number of well-known painters, in return for which he was given his fare, as much of their products for his own use as he cared to ask for and a small commission on sales. He produced their business card with a note, ‘Introducing Mr Sydney Jones’, written on it. He showed Ricky the list of painters they had given him. Ricky was not altogether surprised to find his mother’s name at the top.
With as ill a grace as could be imagined, he said he supposed Ricky ‘wouldn’t come at putting the arm on her’, which Ricky interpreted as a suggestion that he should give Syd an introduction to his mother.
‘When are you going to pay your calls?’ Ricky asked.
The next day, it seemed. And it turned out that Syd was spending the night with friends who shared a pad in Battersea. Jerome et Cie had expressed the wish that he should modify his personal appearance.
‘Bloody commercial shit,’ he said violently. ‘Make you vomit, wouldn’t it?’
They arrived at the wharves in Montjoy at half past eight. Ricky watched the crates of fish being loaded into the ferry and saw Syd Jones go up the gangplank. He waited until the ferry sailed. Syd had vanished, but at the last moment he re-appeared on deck wearing his awful raincoat and with his paintbox still slung over his shoulder.
Ricky spent a pleasant day in Montjoy and bicycled back to the Cove in the late afternoon.
Rather surprisingly, the Ferrants had a telephone. That evening Ricky put a call through to his parents advising them of the approach of Sydney Jones.
